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Tag: Public Art

This pair of drive-by shots shows what remained on Tuesday of the Hyde Park building that until recently housed South and Central American craft store Corazon. After receiving a series of short-term lease extensions, the store’s owner Chris Murphytold Swamplot last October that he only had a month left in the space at 2318 Waugh Dr., which had housed the store since 1998 and served as a canvas for Houston’s fifth red dot on its Fairview-St. side. (It opened a year earlier on Montrose Blvd. a few blocks south of 59 in a spot within the former Gramercy Apartments that’s now occupied by the Museum Tower.)

Murphy began renting the blue and gray building that’s now collapsing for $650 a month over the discouragements of his friends, reported the Chronicle’s Ileana Najarro, who warned him of its location in “the middle of nowhere” and of the visibly lopsidedposture it’d assumed over its 100-year lifespan. (Joke’s on them: the building, wrote Najarro, went on to survive 8 car crashes during the time Corazon was inside.) Harris County’s appraisal district dates its construction to around 1880. Since then, it’s done stints as a smithy, glass-blowing studio, antique store, general store, and furniture refinishing shop.

Once the dust has settled from the demolition, a set of 3 townhomes are set to rise in its place. Murphy plans to continue dealing products from South and Central American artists online.

Last year, Boxer Property told reporters it wanted to do something “iconic” with the St. Joseph’s Professional Building along the Pierce Elevated. Well, how about this idea: bringing the 18-story Midtown office building to life by attaching 2 massive, swinging arms to its east and west sides. Boxer engaged The Art Guys (Jack Massing and Michael Galbreth) shortly after purchasing the building in September 2017 to make it happen. They worked on the project in secret, dubbing it The Walking Building. It had an estimated budget of $2.8 million.

Alas, the vision of a giant robotic pedestrian attempting to cross a busy section of I-45 into Downtown was not to be. Boxer informed The Art Guys 2 months ago that it would no longer pursue the project.

The arms would have swung back and forward roughly once a minute, making for a somewhat leisurely gait:

Make that 55 days that the prank poster installed by UH student Jevh Maravilla and a group of accomplices has been hanging in the Shadow Creek Ranch McDonald’s. And there’ll be plenty more time to see it: An unidentified McDonald’s representative tells Eater Houston that the store at 2815 Business Center Dr. has no plans to take it down, noting however that renovations are planned in the future.

Maravilla (right) took the photo of him and his friend Christian Toledo (left) at the Westside Event Center — just a mile away on the opposite side of 288. He then added graphic elements to mimic the other wall art in the store and ordered a print through Office Depot’s online service. Clad in a McDonald’s employee shirt he picked up for $7 at a nearby thrift store — along with a tie, clip-on walkie-talkie, and fake nametag dubbing him a “Regional Interior Coordinator” — Maravilla entered the store and hung the poster with the help of a few more friends.

He describes the undercover op beginning at the one-minute mark in this video:

The title of artist Joan Dodd’s new composition 88 Keys undersells it — it’s actually 275 keys, more than 3 times the amount found on a piano. Installation artists laid them down along the rounded east west side of Jones Hall over the weekend. Constructed from 900 pounds worth of temporary marking tape — the kind commonly used on highways — they now span the entire block of Louisiana between Texas Ave. and Capitol St.

That material choice means they can really take a pounding from anyone who feels like stomping out a silent melody with their feet while heading south to check out the Bank of America Center’s ongoing renovations. Or those lured in by the glow of the Lyric Center parking garage’s new lighting, pictured off in the distance below:

A new downtown hole-in-the-wall is making its debut at the foot of the city’s longstanding famous buildings. Among all the openings in the house now standing in the middle of Sam Houston Park, the most accessible one (ADA-certified) is at the end of the ramp pictured above. Cherry Moving was the first to add holes to the building: it inserted the more conventional windows after scooping up the 80-year old, 16-by-24-ft. single-story from the East End in order to resell it. The buyers: serial house tweakers Dan Havel and Dean Ruck, who perforated its façades and lined the bubbles with PVC piping to make them watertight.

Longtime Gulfton activist Tammy Rodriguez’s likeness is now fully rendered in the mural above, as well as that of Pastor Alejandro Montes, to her right. The pair makes up one third of the population now flanking the Salvation Army store’s west side along Ashcroft Dr. off Bissonnet, a block east of Hillcroft Ave. Chicago-based artist Rahmaan Statik (who got some design inspiration from students at Braeburn Elementary School) plans to have the work complete for an unveiling ceremony this Saturday.

It’s one in a set of 3 murals that public art organization UP Art Studio has planned for each side of the thrift store building — except for the south face, pictured above — as part of a project dubbed “Growing a Brighter Tomorrow in Gulfton.”

Aerosol artist Enrique Figueroa Jr. — also known as Gonzo247 — is about 3 months into his work on a new version of the Rebirth of Our Nationality mural that once faced Canal St. between Norwood and Linwood streets in the East End. Leo Tanguma’s original 1973 work faded over time and was whitewashed last summer. He’s now providing Figueroa with some remote assistance on the redo.

New possibly aquatic-themed street and sidewalk art is bubbling up on Amherst St. west of Kelvin Dr. in Rice Village. The photo at top views a few of the freshly-laid, not-quite-concentric circles from outside the Everything But Water swimwear store that occupies part of the recently renovated retail building on Amherst St. The designs are being placed there by Crossroads Decorative Pavement — whose truck is on site in the photo above looking toward Kelvin.

Leo Tanguma‘s 240-ft.-long, 70-character 1973 mural slowly peeling from the southern facade of the former Continental Can Company warehouse in the East End (pictured above in 2013) was whitewashed over the summer. Mario Enrique Figueroa Jr. — better known to Houstonians as Gonzo247 — is now hard at work on the Chicano-art landmark’s replacement: creating with a small crew a mural of the same name, size, location, characters, and intention. These recent photos show the progress so far:

Somebody carefully disassembled the recently installedquilting sculpture in front of the Bermac Arts Building at 4101 San Jacinto St. just south of Cleburne St. late last week, leaving behind a patchwork of colorful powder-coated-steel pieces on the former bus-stop platform next to the sidewalk. The 8-ft.-tall blue, orange, magenta, yellow, and metallic silver sculpture, called Quilt Peace, was erected at the site on September 20th. It was meant to remain there for 3 months — through next month’s International Quilt Festival at the George R. Brown Convention Center — before being moved to a different Midtown site.

It may have been erected on a one-way northbound street in Lower Midtown, but this new sculpture now standing in front of the oak trees outside the San Jacinto St. entrance to the Bermac Arts Building just south of Cleburne was designed to flag down visitors from Downtown:Quilt Peace, constructed of powder-coated-steel, marks the entrance to the offices and exhibition space of the Community Artists’ Collective, where the Jubilee Quilt Circle meets twice a week to stitch works by hand or with the computer-controlled longarm flatbed stitcher onsite. “Quilt Peace is our tribute to the November 2017 International Quilt Festival at the George R. Brown Convention Center,” explains artist Michelle Barnes — who also happens to be the Collective’s executive director. “. . . We want to demonstrate our connection with quilting to the thousands of convention visitors.”

Corazon — your Hyde Park source for guayaberas, Lucha Libre masks, and other assorted crafty and gifty south-of-the-border imports — has lost its lease and will be leaving its longtime spot at the northwest corner of Waugh and Fairview within a month, store owner Chris Murphy reports. The 6,250-sq.-ft. lot it sits on, which includes a recently demolished property at 1410 Fairview, is now under contract after being marketed as a redevelopment site.

Corazon moved into its current home in 1998 — from a location in the former Gramercy Apartments on Montrose Blvd. across from Bell Park (where the Museum Tower now stands). The corner spot at 2318 Waugh Dr. has a craft-y history: Previously a furniture refinishing shop, the building reportedly earlier had gigs as an antique store, a glass-blowing studio, a general store, and a smithy. Murphy says he expects it to be demolished — and replaced with townhomes.

The partially ruined former Jefferson Davis Hospital nurses quarters at 1225 Elder St. — until very recently in the running for a spot on the National Register of Historic Places — was recommended for demolition at last week’s Harris County Commissioner’s Court meeting following a public hearing the day before. The building, tucked west of the elevated freeway tangle where I-45 splits from I-10 near Downtown, would have joined the nextdoor former Jefferson Davis Hospital itself on the historic registry — instead, it looks like the structure will finally meet meet the ‘dozers after its long slow decline, accelerated by damage from a fire in 2013 that lead to last year’s semi-collapse.

Next door, the 4-story hospital structure (built in 1924, and replaced by 1938 with another Jefferson Davis Hospital where the Federal Reserve building now stands on Allen Pkwy.) cycled through various modes of use and disuse until its early 2000’s restoration into the Elder Street Artist Lofts, which serve as low-rent apartments and studios for artsy types. That redevelopment, of course, involved carefully digging around the dozens of unmarked graves turned up on the surrounding land, which beginning in 1840 had served as the second city cemetery (and as the final resting place for a hodgepodge likely including Confederate soldiers, former slaves, victims of the 1860s yellow fever epidemics, people who died in duels,Masons, and a variety of others). The hospital’s name is still carved above the lofts’ entrance: